Friday words #282

By | September 10, 2021

According to an article I read this week, one in three people might be affected by a condition whose name is this week’s new-to-me word: misokenia. Perhaps you are one of them. Perhaps you don’t know, because like me last week, you don’t have any idea what misokenia means. 

According to a “first-of-its-kind study,” to quote one article, misokenia is a “strong negative affective or emotional response to someone engaging in other small, repetitive movements,” to quote another. In other words, it means really hating it when someone fidgets or chews gum.

Apparently the idea of misokenia has been around since 2013, but like the article said, it was only recently that someone did a systematic study. They tested 4100 people across three studies; they did more than one study in part to get participants who weren’t just students.[1] The results showed that about a third of participants generally reported some level of misokenia, and that it might be more prevalent in older people. (Oh, great, another downside to aging.)

The authors are clear that this is all preliminary information. One question I would be interested in is whether people have heightened misokenia when they’re in certain situations. Like, say, on a long flight in a seat next to someone who will. not. stop. FIDGETING.

The word misokenia is based on Greek for “hatred of movement.” We know the miso- part from words like misanthrope (“hatred of people”) and misogyny (“hatred of women”). The -kenia part is related to words like kinetic. In fact, the word misokenia is modeled on the similar term misophonia, which is an intense dislike of certain sounds, like people chewing or slurping or cracking their knuckles.[2] The authors of the misokenia study didn’t find a strong correlation between these, heh, miseries. But as they say, further research is indicated.

For origins this week, the word honcho. A tweet by the editor Tom Freeman got me thinking about this word:

Text: “You never hear about anyone being deputy honcho, do you, or assistant honcho. Reckon the honcho sector is dangerously top-heavy.”

He’s funnin’, but he’s also right: among collocates for honcho, the most common one is head.

Charts showing two charts of collocates for the word "honcho." One chart is for nouns and the other is for adjectives. The first entry in both charts is "head." For nouns, the number of instances is  34, with the next collocate ("network") being 8. For adjectives, the number of "head" collocates is 150 and the next number ("big") is 18.

I don’t think I’d ever thought about where the word honcho came from, but I would have bet it was from Spanish, what do you think?

Nope. It comes from the Japanese word hanchō, meaning “group leader,” made up of han (“squad”) and chō (“chief”). Apparently this came into Japanese from Chinese, or so sources say. American soldiers picked it up during World War II (as prisoners) and later (when stationed there). This gives us an unusually precise timing for when the word entered English.

Back to Freeman’s point about deputy or assistant honchos. I guess in theory, if honcho means “leader,” it sort of doesn’t make sense to talk about a deputy honcho. On the other hand, it’s also redundant to say head honcho.

Now I know that at work, if one of my authors writes head honcho, I’ll be prepared to discuss whether we really want to include head. Of course, the likelihood of us ever using the word honcho, head or otherwise, is pretty much zero. Still, I’m ready if it comes up.

Like this? Read all the Friday words.

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[1] Related: the WEIRD problem. [^]

[2] An older Friday word and, alas, an affliction all too familiar to me.[^]